


Quercus

by orphan_account



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: F/M, I Don't Even Know, Light Bondage, Murder, cannibalistic tree spirit things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-10
Updated: 2013-04-10
Packaged: 2017-12-08 03:15:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/756358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>written for the Vikings kink meme, for the prompt "Floki/Helga: I'd love it if Helga was more than she seemed-- a certain god or goddess maybe?"</p><p>In which Floki befriends a person in the woods.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Quercus

It's late and everyone is asleep and Floki sits by the fire, humming. The weather is getting warmer, Ragnar is getting better, Lagertha is getting calmer, and Helga. He discards the verb. Helga. He is happy. The end.

Torstein sidles up to him, a crab in man's clothing, and coughs. "May I ask you something?"

Floki shrugs.

"Your woman," Torstein says, nervously, "is she - "

"She's not my woman," Floki says, and goes back to his humming.

* * *

He plucked garlic from the ground, dug like a dog for it and it came into his hands white and papery. Its ripeness stung his fingers and he broke off a piece of clove and popped it in his mouth, paper and all. Wards off spirits and the earl’s men. He chewed and crouched back down to dig. His fingers were stained with earth.

She laid an arm across his shoulder, leaned on his back, kissed his ear. Her hand was translucent when she put it over his eyes

“Guess,” she said.

He spat the crushed clove on her arm.

“Wrong,” she said, and her hands tightened around his neck. 

He woke up in a field of garlic blooms, a chain of the flowers draped on his shoulders. She smiled at him from a tree-stump and faded into the wood. He knew enough not to follow. 

* * *

When she came, in the trees or the swamp or the patch of wild strawberries behind his cluttered shack, she came with her hair down. It was wavy and flax-colored and he twined the strands of it between his fingers. Sometimes she came with her teeth red. Once she came all proud and lovely in a blood-spattered gown, too small for her woman’s body, her arms full of nightshade. 

“Did you eat her?”

“I found her,” she said. She tipped his head back and fed him the berries. They were unaccountably sweet. What should have been retching pains in his belly instead made his forehead tingle and he licked her fingers. “They killed her, your earl’s men. Not me." 

“He wants me to make boats for him.”

“Make boats that sink,” she suggested.

“I do, I do.” The trees had talked to him even before she came; he knew which plank to gnaw on, which drunken captain to hire. The earl blamed his own bad luck. “Why’d they kill her?”

“Don’t know.”

“What did she look like?”

“Me.” 

“That was Helga. The miller’s daughter.”

“Helga,” she said, and scraped at the red-drying-to-brown on the collar of the tight dress. Her eyes were bright. “That’s a pretty name. It’s my name now.”

He sucked nightshade from her fingers so his lips were black. The next day he poisoned an earl’s man, dragged him back to his house. She took the body without a thank-you and disappeared into the woods. The dress had already begun to tatter.

 

* * *

 

No one came in deep winter. Not even laughing Ragnar came in deep winter. Ragnar son of Odin had a wife golden-haired and vicious; he liked her well enough, but how they drew power  made him itch. She had both feet firmly planted on the ground. He stayed up in the trees. Ragnar could occasionally shimmy up a trunk, but in the winter he hibernated, like a bear. Floki threw a bearskin around his shoulders and sat by the fire, eating dried berries. He coughed, and then coughed blood. The snow outside deepened.

She came cold and naked into his house. She was always cold in winter, her skin rough with the wind, dried leave shaking from her flaxen hair. She ate, though she didn’t need to, and then she pushed him down into the hearth and shucked off his pants. She stroked his cockhead and when he tried to move she pinned his wrists to the hot stones. She kissed him and when she sat back up her lips were red with his blood. She smiled at him and he touched her face. Her eyelids were circled with charcoal, or leafmold, and when he tried to move again the snap of her leaves encircled his wrists. He arched up into her. panting hard; she licked him, once, and giggled when he writhed.

“I have all night,” she sang.

“I don’t,” he said, and half-tackled her. She squeaked and giggled as he buried his face between her legs. She was sweet as wild strawberries – on purpose, he knew – and when he found her clitoris she shrieked like a fox and laughed into her hands. She let him pleasure her for a while and then rolled him back on the hearth and guided him into her, and when he kissed her fingertips they tasted of honey. He wept and begged before she let him come. She put her hands around his throat and when he woke up the burr in his chest had disappeared. The sun was up, the hearthfire had gone out, and there were still vines tying his hands to the each other.

“Helgaaaaa,” he said.

She stuck her head out from the doorframe and cackled like a witch. The snow was melting in runnels over the doorframe and there were crocuses in her hand. The vines around him bloomed white for a moment and then wilted away and he could sit up. She blew him a kiss and disappeared, leaving him naked and alone among the petals.

He laughs.

* * *

 

“I can talk to the trees,' he’d boasted to the child. “I know which ones will give good planks.”

“This one?” The child was eager, too eager, kept knocking on the trees and irritating the squirrels. “Is this one good?”

This one was an old oak, tangled with mistletoe, spotted here and there with leafmold and the usual rust of an aging tree. 

“By Odin, boy,” Ragnar said, “don’t you know anything?” He fished a coin out of his pocket and threw it at the tree’s base. “This is an oak of the gods. Look at that mistletoe.”

“Still,” Floki said, and put his ear against it, “it’s a nice old tree.”

“Not funny, mortal.”

“I lied. It's not a nice old tree. This one’s all wormy,” he said, ear still against the bark. “Filled with maggots. Best leave it up.”

“Ooooh, you’re in _trouble,_ ” she hissed, with a giggle in the back of her voice, and he felt the phantoms of vines around his wrist. He laid a kiss on the shaggy bark and danced away, nearly colliding with the child and smirking Ragnar. 

“Not that one,” he repeated. 

Later, Floki came and cut his thumb above the roots of the tree. He could see the bones of the earl’s man, the one he had poisoned last summer, sticking out of the ground. His blood dripped on the roots and she sighed. Her arms were light when they settled on his shoulders. She sucked at the blood on his finger, kissed him on the ear.

“I like you, mortal,” she said. Her teeth were sharp against his neck. “You can live.”

He palmed a garlic clove from his pocket.

She stuck her tongue out at him and disappeared. 

* * *

"Um," Torstein says, jarring him out of his reverie, "I thought you said she was taken?"

"Oh yes."

"Then - "

"She's not my woman," Floki says again, watching the ashes on the hearth move. Helga is asleep on his bed, stained between the thighs with the seed of two men. He'll have to wake her up before she starts growing leaves on the bedframe again. "She's hers."

**Author's Note:**

> uh. idk. As far as I know, there are no cannibalistic tree spirit things in Norse mythology. Helga's just special, I guess.


End file.
